Little Glass House of Horror: Taking Damien Hirst Seriously

2013

This practice based MRes project examines the physiological terror-sublime proposed by Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Using the Enquiry as a manual for artistic production, and employing word charts to map the territory, this project looks to embody ideas of the Burkean sublime in contemporary practice. Simon Morley, in the introduction to The Sublime, broadly describes the subject as ‘…fundamentally transformative, about the relationship between disorder and order, and the disruption of the stable coordinates of time and space…in looking at the relevance of the concept to contemporary art, we are also addressing an experience with implications that go far beyond aesthetics… Awe and wonder can quickly blur into terror, giving rise to a darker aspect of the sublime experience, when the exhilarating feeling of delight metamorphoses into a flirtation with dissolution and the ‘daemonic’’ (Morley, 2010:12) This project uses Burke’s Enquiry as the premise for the creation of gallery-based film and installation, alongside a written comparative analysis of relevant literature and artworks, in order to identify a proposed nihilistic turn in the Burkean terror sublime. In the sublime experience, the reveal of an external annihilating power, a shift in perception or a realisation of great depth or distance, leaves us newly aware of our physical limits and the limits of our rational capacities. The possibility of art to discuss an experience at the edge, where conventional language falters, has resulted in a range of artwork, across mediums, which can be identified with the sublime. Distinct from beauty and containing feelings of awe and reverence, the rush of the sublime can be discerned in the installations of Finnish duo IC-98, Anish Kapoor’s deep, dark voids and Bruce Conner’s apocalyptic Crossroads (1976). Through a process of making and reflection focusing on the dynamics of the Burkean sublime, and with reference to contemporary writing on the subject in both aesthetics and philosophy, this MRes asks - how is the sublime in Burke’s Enquiry distinct from the Kantian transcendent sublime, what is the pleasurable terror at the heart of the Enquiry and, by addressing Burke’s ideas through the artistic process, can a pessimism at the heart of Burke’s system be traced?

2009

The essay analyses Damian Hirst's (in)famous artwork, /For the Love of God/ (2007), a diamond-encrusted skull. It examines the relation between the experience of the work and its staging of the material cost of its production and its sale price as unthinkable sums. The essay argues that the work functions through its evocation of such a sum as "sublime", and working through some parallels in the language used in Marx's analysis of the commodity and Kant's aesthetics, proposes that in fact capital has always been the (impossible) "sublime object" at the heart of the discourse on sublimity. The essay examines, in particular, the way that /For the Love of God/ places its viewer within a fantasy scene of globalised capitalism, and that within this, whether this is Hirst's "content" in the work or not, the occluded violence and exploitation at the heart of this (unpresentable) transnational scene of the capitalist production of value returns to haunt the work.

All of modern life is a spectacle. Much of what contemporary man experiences in Western society is a false social construct mediated by images. These mediated images create desires that can never be fulfilled; they create false needs that can never be met. “Many of our daily decisions are governed by motivations over which we have no control and of which we are quite unaware” (Berger 41). The constant specter of the mediated image creates an endless cycle of desire, consumption, and disinterest, fueling a banality in life that feeds the commodification of life. Increasingly life itself becomes a commodity and the image more important than the reality it represents.

2007

The paper explores the way that the sublime is implicated in commercialised culture as well as high art through some strange parallels between the contemporary artist Damien Hirst and the eighteenth-century actor, dramatist and theatrical entrepreneur Colley Cibber. Cibber was a key butt of satire in Pope's writings, which set out to critique commercial culture in the inverted image of the sublime. I argue, however, that the poetics of the sublime was eagerly taken up by the commercialising culture of the day, and that the growth of this commodified culture was key to the development of discourses on the sublime. Both Hirst and Cibber, because of their investment in such discourses, and their positioning within the commercial field and as classed outsiders, remain suspended in an ironised position between the sublime and the bathetic.

The article deals with the problem of overcoming the fear of death in contemporary art. The model for analysis is the programmatic artwork of Damien Hirst, his hallmark, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living. The author turns to the playful intertwinement of signs and symbols presented different levels of symbolic reading of the art object. The purpose of this article is to unravel the network of Hirst’s symbols and to try to understand whether the artist has reached his goal, and has created the symbol of immortality in the consciousness of the audience operating with the chain of artifacts-signs. The author comes to the conclusion that as long as the base category is the category of body aesthetics, the art isn't able to overcome the fear of physical threat of nothingness.

The Sublime Reader (ch. 37), 2019

This paper sketches my theory of the sublime and aesthetic awe. The chapter is found in the first comprehensive, historical anthology containing representative readings on the sublime: The Sublime Reader (Bloomsbury, 2019)

Prolonging the concept in art theory related to Andy Warhol's art, whose (photo)graphic series are characterized by " traumatic" , id est repetitive, operation of technique, Hal Foster introduces the term traumatic sublime to describe Bill Viola's video works. The term relates not only to themes presented in the videos, but also to the media presenting them. Through HD installation Ocean without Shore at the 52 nd Venice Biennale, Viola emphasised how important technical specifications of media are for his work, defining the colour saturation on the video with water curtains. The paper gives an overview of technical evolution of Bill Viola's works and of the term sublime, from Longinus, over Immanuel Kant, to Hal Foster and Jean-François Lyotard. It concludes that traumatic sublime can be related to several forms of new media art, not exclusively to Bill Viola's work.